January 06, 2007

Web Wanderings: Superdickery

Yes, I know, it sounds like a cheesy porn site, but Superdickery started out as a collection of old comic book covers showing Superman being...well, being a dickhead:

Q: How'd this all start?

A: Back in November of 2004, a guy named Mike Miksch started a thread at a Transformers message board called The Allspark
about insane comic book covers throughout the ages. Initially it was a
laugh in at the expense of Lois Lane Comics, but before the responses
had gotten past even the first page, Mike had posted a pair of pictures
depicting Superman burning a father's day gift from Jimmy and laughing
in Lois's face as she begged him to prevent her from being forced to
marry Titanman, and inadvertently set the tone for the resulting 30+
pages of responses:

Superman is a dick.

Technically he said "Superman is such
a dick," but the "such" was subsequently dropped from the mantra. And
from there it spread across a fair number of blogs and other discussion
board forums, which Mike didn't become aware of until his coworker came
up to him and told him that he'd seen the thread and was surprised to
see that Mike started it. From there it was imitated by I-Mockery
when they did a write up about about stupid comic book covers focusing
on Jimmy Olsen comics. That made the front page of Fark.com, where someone posted a link to the original thread on The Allspark, so it all came full circle.

At more than a quarter million views, that thread beats out the nearest
competitor ten times over. Such is the appeal of Superman is a Dick.

From there, the website has grown, and now there are galleries devoted to just about every aspect of American comic book art that you can make fun of. I found myself laughing out loud at the funny/bad/warpedness of it all. Here's an example from the "Weird Science" gallery at right.